Share your Netlify experience with others

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All of us are here to get information about Netlify, but why not share an experience you had using Netlify.

Some examples:

  • Long time site converted
  • Finally built the example you never could get to and it took 10 minutes with Netlify
  • You introduced Netlify to a friend and you are now promised their first born
  • Thought it was a container hosting service

Keep it real!

If you are an employee, share how you first heard of Netlify. Now you work for the best company on the modern web. How the heck does that feel?

3 Likes

I was bemoaning the complexity in enterprise CMS, and advocating for simplifying and using SSGs (Jekyll, back then) at conferences in 2012. (It’s fun for me to look back at some of those slides and see many of the themes I still call out, being present then).

It wasn’t until 2014 that I really started shouting about the potential in static sites and their maturing tooling ecosystem. Even then I was struggling with titles for talks:

Dynamic Static Site Strategies doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue! But it did mention BitBalloon (the forerunner to Netlify) and tweets about that from attendees at the conference put my talk in the line of sight of Matt and Chris, Netlify’s founders.

I became more and more of a fan of using Netlify, and my conference talks regularly needed a “honestly, I don’t work for them” disclaimer.

Over time, I was able to use Netlify at a few different stages on client work for the agency I was working at. And struck up occasional conversations with Matt and Chris as the used me as a sounding board for agency/team features.

Now as a Netlifyer, I get to see more of the internal planning and development that goes into making the features we all use. And the complexity and challenges that the team have to overcome in the pursuit of simplicity for the end user is pretty inspiring. It reminds me regularly how few projects of my own I’d be able to get out into the wild if I was still responsible for my own hosting infrastructure.

3 Likes

I’m one who prefers static html which I code myself. SSG’s, while definitely (sort of) convenient, e…g Hugo, which I myself like but do not use, come with burdens. One is complexity, which for users new to SSG’s, can easily push said persons to the point of abandoning them completely in favor of extremely insecure offerings such as Wordpress which requires more knowledge to deter the malicious bored and criminal from, at worst, destroying one’s business and identity thievery.
SSG’s - Hugo, Django, Hexo, Gatsby, Jekyll, etc. are easier to secure yet still require in-depth understanding of various security and privacy functions which, when used with such sites, can become extremely complicated (just ask Mozilla and have a look at just their Content-Security-Policy setup. It’s certainly not ideal as MDN existed prior to certain devs scripting the CSP along with other HTPP headers.
Taking the time to learn how to code a static html site is worth it in the end. Additions & alterations to your site become as easy as a few lines of code. If said code includes scripts and/or stylesheets, adding to your CSP - using either SRI hashes or Strict-Dynamic nonces or hashes - becomes a breeze and takes but a few extra minutes.
You then create a from scratch site using the knowledge that you, not SSG generators’ devs, know and understand how to use in your future creations. Moreover, and best of all, you will be able to rest assured that your site(s) visitors feel secure and know their privacy is assured due to you, the site’s owner, actually caring about such quaint notions, unlike most of the web as it now exists. There’s no better feeling. We all must play our part to create an internet that ensures security and privacy for all, because as we all know, as it now exists, the internet is anything but private and secure.

Some resources to take advantage of:

  1. https://observatory.mozilla.org/
  2. https://csp-evaluator.withgoogle.com/
  3. https://htbridge.com/
  4. https://securityheaders.com/
  5. https://hstspreload.org

(Mozilla’s Observatory, first in the list. has direct links to all other above sites.)

And, of course, Netlify via a well scripted netlify.toml or _headers file defining security and privacy settings. I’m personally very impressed by the ease with which Netlify not only gives these tools to site owners but also how utterly simple the layout of either file is to write.

  • intr0
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